Aftenposten versus Facebook: triggering a crucial debate

The Napalm girl

It is an icon of war photography: the black-and-white image reveals a naked nine-year-old girl, fleeing from an explosion, screaming, her face distorted with pain. Taken by Vietnamese-American photographer, Nick Ut, during the napalm strike on a Vietnamese village in 1972, the Pulitzer prize-winning photo, “The Terror of War”, raised controversy in 2016, when Facebook banned it because of “inappropriate content”.

“I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg telling him that I wouldn’t comply,” remembers Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, who shared the post on Facebook and got threatened with a permanent ban. Hansen’s bold letter, splashed across the front page of Aftenposten, condemned Facebook for creating rules that first “cannot distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs” and then “exclude every possible debate.” The letter drew massive support and became the starting point for a heated discussion around Facebook’s intricate censorship rules and the control of content through newsfeed algorithms...

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